Waymo tops new self-driving report, Apple brings up rear

Apple's self-driving car project isn't doing so well. Last month more than 200 employees from the team were sent to other machine learning divisions. Then in a report this week, Apple came to dead last of 62 companies permitted to test drive autonomous vehicles in California.

The California DMV puts out its annual disengagement reports. It's measured in disengagements per 1,000 miles or miles per disengagement.

Waymo, which is owned by Google parent company Alphabet, had the best rates. Apple, the sausage

Waymo came out on top with only .09 disengagements every 1,000 miles. Put another way, its self-driving cars were able to go for 1,017 miles until a human interfered. That's the mileage of the second-best company, General Motor's Cruise, at 5,205 miles per disengagement.

Waymo's blog post on Wednesday reduced its rate from last year to nearly 100 percent increase in number of miles traveled to disengagement (last year it was 5,595 miles).

"Disengagements in these cases are actually a good This is because they are the equivalent of discovering and solving an issue with our car's capability, the team wrote about the latest numbers.

For Cruise, this year was a huge improvement over last year, even if its numbers lagged behind the leader, Waymo. In 2018, cruises drove more than 447,600 autonomous miles in California, compared to 129,764 in 2017. (This year, Waymo clocked 1.2 million miles in the state.)

Cruise and Waymo have the most cars allowed to drive in autonomous fashion : 175 and 126, respectively, based on DMV data.

So far, one month and a half in the year, only four collision reports have come in – all but one happened while the cars were in manual mode. One from Waymo, two from Cruise, and one from Aurora. Apple is not driving like a Cruise and Waymo, but it crashes twice last year.

The dismal Apple numbers show the tech company isn't really feeling self-driving cars like it once was – it's barely testing its vehicles and it's laid off workers.